te sweetness.

"You will--protect me?" she asked.

"With my life and with my honour," he answered. "Honora, there will be
no happiness like ours."

"I wish I knew," she sighed: and then, her look returning from the veil,
rested on him with a tenderness that was inexpressible. "I--I don't
care, Hugh. I trust you."

The sun was setting. Slowly they went back together through the paths
of the tangled garden, which had doubtless seen many dramas, and the
courses changed of many lives: overgrown and outworn now, yet love was
loth to leave it. Honora paused on the lawn before the house, and looked
back at him over her shoulder.

"How happy we could have been here, in those days," she sighed.

"We will be happier there," he said.

Honora loved. Many times in her life had she believed herself to
have had this sensation, and yet had known nothing of these aches and
ecstasies! Her mortal body, unattended, went out to dinner that evening.
Never, it is said, was her success more pronounced. The charm of
Randolph Leffingwell, which had fascinated the nobility of three
kingdoms, had descended on her, and hostesses had discovered that she
possessed the magic touch necessary to make a dinner complete. Her
quality, as we know, was not wit: it was something as old as the world,
as new as modern psychology. It was, in short, the power to stimulate.
She infused a sense of well-being; and ordinary people, in her presence,
surprised themselves by saying clever things.

Lord Ayllington, a lean, hard-riding gentleman, who was supposed to be
on the verge of contracting an alliance with the eldest of the Grenfell
girls, regretted that Mrs. Spence was neither unmarried nor an heiress.

"You know," he said to Cecil Grainger, who happened to be gracing his
wife's dinner-party, "she's the sort of woman for whom a man might
consent to live in Venice."

"And she's the sort of woman," replied, "a man couldn't get to go to
Venice."

Lord Ayllington's sigh was a proof of an intimate knowledge of the
world.

"I suppose not," he said. "It's always so. And there are few American
women who would throw everything overboard for a grand passion."

"You ought to see her on the beach," Mr. Grainger suggested.

"I intend to," said Ayllington. "By the way, not a few of your American
women get divorced, and keep their cake and eat it, too. It's a bit
difficult, here at Newport, for a stranger, you know."

"I'm willing to bet," declared Mr. Grainge